CHRIS O’REAL writes…
A few years ago I spent a summer working in a Call Centre. It was definitely the lowest moment of my working life.
Each call lasted about 20 minutes and I had to reel through dozens of screens of text, and repeat the same words verbatim over and over again. One time I tried to spice things up a bit and said things like ‘hello’ instead of ‘good afternoon’, but the manager was monitoring me and went ape shit. I’ve never been bollocked for a more meaningless reason in my life.
Luckily there was another guy working there who was really sound, and together we slowly but surely brought down the morale of the whole team. To try to break the monotony we made sure to play as many games as you can imagine you can play while reading a script aloud for 9 hours a day. One of my favourites was ‘Consequences’ - a trusted classic from the time killer’s arsenal. We would each take it in turns to draw a section of someone’s body (in our case 5 separate sections), and take great care to hide what had already been drawn. Once it was finished, we would unfold it to see the comical results.
The thing is, when you start off everyone keeps on drawing Hitler or a dead whore over and over again, which doesn’t look all that original. But… when you get the balance of irrelevant sections right… FANTASTIC!!
This is one that I saved and just found in a shoebox. I don’t mean to be big-headed, but I think it’s perfect. If I remember correctly we actually stopped playing Consequences after this effort because we knew it would never be beaten. EVER.
Oh, and on the back of it was a list that we made of every person we had to call who had a ‘funny’ answer machine message. Bear in mind this was a few years ago, so the people behind these numbers might have grown up a little bit and changed their voicemail… Or, they might have changed it to something even funnier! Why not ring up and see?